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THE HARVARD UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT
CRUEL & UNUSUAL
MAINTAINING POLITE SOCIETY AGAINST ALL ODDS
SEPTEMBER 2025 VOLUME V ISSUE II
CRUEL & UNUSUAL
MAINTAINING POLITE SOCIETY AGAINST ALL ODDS
SEPTEMBER 2025 VOLUME V ISSUE II
p. 2
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
R ICHaRD Y. R ODgERs
DEPUTY EDITOR
CHaRlEs B. BRaTTON II
assOCIaTE EDITORs
D EClaN I.M. D EaDY
D avID F.X. a RMY
lUIs E. CaRDENas
IMPRESSUM:
The Harvard Salient is an independent undergraduate
student publication of Harvard College, dedicated
to the presentation of conservative thought and
scholarship by students, faculty, and alumni of
Harvard University. It is published by Salient
Publications, Inc., with the generous support of its
committed benefactors.
The name Harvard College is a trademark of the
President and Fellows of Harvard College and is
used with the permission of Harvard University.
“The Harvard Salient” and the S-feather logo and all
derivations thereof are registered trademarks of
Salient Publications, Inc. © 2025 Salient Publications,
Inc. All rights reserved.
The views expressed in essays published do not
necessarily reflect those of Salient Publications, Inc. or
the editorial board of The Harvard Salient. While the
editors are responsible for the selection and editing of
content, the opinions expressed and the accuracy of
the facts presented remain the sole responsibility of the
individual authors.
www.harvardsalient.com
www.salientpublications.com
TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE HARVARD SALIENT:
Visit www.salientpublications.com/subscribe,
email secretary@salientharvard.com, or write
to:
The Harvard Salient
8 Eliot Street
Cambridge, MA 02318
LETTER TO THE EDITOR GUIDELINES:
The Harvard Salient welcomes all varieties
of letters to the editor. To submit a letter
to the editor, email the Editor-in-Chief at
editor@salientharvard.com. Note that letters to
the editor are not published pseudonymously/
anonymously, and that authors or editors are
allowed to respond to relevant letters in print.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Before submitting unsolicited material, consult
with the editor(s) at editor@salientharvard.com.
Essays ought not exceed 2,000 words, fiction
and book reviews 1,500. Notes should be
formatted as footnotes and kept to a bare
minimum.
All other inquiries: info@salientharvard.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITOR’S NOTE: CRUEL & UNUSUAL LIVING 3
1 2
EDITORIAL BOARD
THE CRY OF BLOOD 37
NEC VITIA NEC REMEDIA
The Moral Crisis of a Civilization Too Kind to Survive
28
On Law, Natural Order, and the Necessity of Retribution
THE ROD & THE REPUBLIC 18
Discipline, Virtue, and the Moral Education of a People
IN DEFENSE OF UNDERSTANDING 33
The Spanish Inquisition and Now
THE VIOLENCE OF OUR TIME 24
A Defense of Guantanamo Bay
HARVARD REVIEW 23
DEFENDING THE SWORD OF FINALITY
Justice, Mercy, and Capital Necessity
4
AN AUDACIOUS PROPOSAL 7
A Reexamination of the Death Penalty
NON OCCIDES 13
The Commandment and the Common Good
THE EXECUTIONER’S WILL 44
R ICHaRD Y. R ODgERs
DEPUTY EDITOR
CHaRlEs B. BRaTTON II
assOCIaTE EDITORs
D EClaN I.M. D EaDY
D avID F.X. a RMY
lUIs E. CaRDENas
IMPRESSUM:
The Harvard Salient is an independent undergraduate
student publication of Harvard College, dedicated
to the presentation of conservative thought and
scholarship by students, faculty, and alumni of
Harvard University. It is published by Salient
Publications, Inc., with the generous support of its
committed benefactors.
The name Harvard College is a trademark of the
President and Fellows of Harvard College and is
used with the permission of Harvard University.
“The Harvard Salient” and the S-feather logo and all
derivations thereof are registered trademarks of
Salient Publications, Inc. © 2025 Salient Publications,
Inc. All rights reserved.
The views expressed in essays published do not
necessarily reflect those of Salient Publications, Inc. or
the editorial board of The Harvard Salient. While the
editors are responsible for the selection and editing of
content, the opinions expressed and the accuracy of
the facts presented remain the sole responsibility of the
individual authors.
www.harvardsalient.com
www.salientpublications.com
TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE HARVARD SALIENT:
Visit www.salientpublications.com/subscribe,
email secretary@salientharvard.com, or write
to:
The Harvard Salient
8 Eliot Street
Cambridge, MA 02318
LETTER TO THE EDITOR GUIDELINES:
The Harvard Salient welcomes all varieties
of letters to the editor. To submit a letter
to the editor, email the Editor-in-Chief at
editor@salientharvard.com. Note that letters to
the editor are not published pseudonymously/
anonymously, and that authors or editors are
allowed to respond to relevant letters in print.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Before submitting unsolicited material, consult
with the editor(s) at editor@salientharvard.com.
Essays ought not exceed 2,000 words, fiction
and book reviews 1,500. Notes should be
formatted as footnotes and kept to a bare
minimum.
All other inquiries: info@salientharvard.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITOR’S NOTE: CRUEL & UNUSUAL LIVING 3
1 2
EDITORIAL BOARD
THE CRY OF BLOOD 37
NEC VITIA NEC REMEDIA
The Moral Crisis of a Civilization Too Kind to Survive
28
On Law, Natural Order, and the Necessity of Retribution
THE ROD & THE REPUBLIC 18
Discipline, Virtue, and the Moral Education of a People
IN DEFENSE OF UNDERSTANDING 33
The Spanish Inquisition and Now
THE VIOLENCE OF OUR TIME 24
A Defense of Guantanamo Bay
HARVARD REVIEW 23
DEFENDING THE SWORD OF FINALITY
Justice, Mercy, and Capital Necessity
4
AN AUDACIOUS PROPOSAL 7
A Reexamination of the Death Penalty
NON OCCIDES 13
The Commandment and the Common Good
THE EXECUTIONER’S WILL 44
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There is nothing inherently
cruel in putting a man to death. To
suppose otherwise is to presume
that death itself is, above all else,
something to be feared. Such
a worldview reeks of modern
sentimentality and lacks the
intellectual sturdiness developed by
Christian and pagan philosophers
alike. A belief in death as oblivion,
that fashionable creed of our so-
called New Atheists, is taken on
faith just as much as belief in life
after death. Both claim to know that
which is, to man, unknowable. The
difference is that one who believes
in something beyond the grave
does not pretend to have reasoned
it out from first principles. Instead,
it is received from a coherent
philosophical and theological
framework. He accepts that he must
have faith because he understands
the limits of his rational mind.
Those who proclaim death-as-
oblivion do so, in part, because they
cannot abide their own ignorance.
A curious side effect of
this materialist creed becoming the
default cosmology of the modern
West is that murder, or indeed any
killing, has come to be seen as the
final, unforgivable sin. If death is the
one wound from which no man may
recover, then to kill, for any reason,
becomes the supreme transgression.
Even to kill in self-defense is, for
such minds, insufficiently justified,
for the slain man ceases to be.
This logic underpins much of
the modern opposition to capital
punishment: something so absolute,
so final, can never, it is said, be justly
administered by the hand of man.
The argument is not
without appeal. It seems reasonable
to assert that trusting anyone—even
blindfolded Lady Justice herself—
with the sword of finality is to invite
corruption, and that the result will
be injustice multiplied rather than
justice secured. Indeed, history
bears this out: tyrannies ancient and
modern—above all, the atheistic
regimes of the twentieth century—
sent millions to their deaths in the
name of “justice.” We congratulate
ourselves that we are more civilized
than these sorts, and perhaps even
more civilized than the ancients.
But is there truly a better way?
No. There is not. If one
accepts that there is life after this
one, then the best thing a criminal
DEFENDING THE SWORD
OF FINALITY
Justice, Mercy, and Capital Necessity
4
D EClaN I.M. D EaDY
3
Ours is an age of cruelty
made ordinary. We suffer indignities
our ancestors would have called
intolerable and congratulate
ourselves for our sensitivity in
bearing them. The disorders that
beset our public life—lawlessness
at the borders, confusion in the
schools, corruption in the courts,
decay in the churches—are not
accidents of policy but symptoms
of a deeper malaise: a civilization
that has forgotten what it means
to be just, and therefore what it
means to be merciful. We live cruel
and unusual lives, not because our
punishments are too severe, but
because our virtues are too weak.
The essays that follow
take their bearings from this crisis.
One confronts the decadence of
modern penology and dares to
ask whether a nation that will not
punish evil can long claim to hate
it. Another contends that the very
defense of life—once the hallmark
of Christian civilization—requires
a reexamination of justice itself,
lest mercy dissolve into sentiment
and the law into pity. Others turn
to the Inquisition and the family
to recover what the modern
conscience has unlearned: that
discipline, both civic and domestic,
is the seedbed of freedom. Still
another surveys our borders and
finds there a parable of the soul—a
nation so terrified of being called
cruel that it has forgotten how to
live at all. And one final meditation
reminds us that justice cannot be
suspended forever, for the blood of
the innocent cries even now from
the ground.
Together, these reflections
trace the anatomy of a civilization
losing its nerve. We are governed by
a class that fears virtue because it
implies judgment, and by a people
who mistake comfort for peace. Our
politics, our institutions, even our
homes have grown humane to the
point of self-extinction. Yet if the
ship of state is to be steered from
the rocks toward which it drifts, it
will not be by indulgence, but by
the recovery of what our forebears
called order—an order tempered
by charity, but firm in conviction,
confident that civilization is worth
both defending and disciplining.
The cruelty of our time lies
not in what we forbid, but in what we
permit. To live humanely again, we
must dare to be thought severe. a
EDITOR’S NOTE
Cruel & Unusual Living
Publius
cruel in putting a man to death. To
suppose otherwise is to presume
that death itself is, above all else,
something to be feared. Such
a worldview reeks of modern
sentimentality and lacks the
intellectual sturdiness developed by
Christian and pagan philosophers
alike. A belief in death as oblivion,
that fashionable creed of our so-
called New Atheists, is taken on
faith just as much as belief in life
after death. Both claim to know that
which is, to man, unknowable. The
difference is that one who believes
in something beyond the grave
does not pretend to have reasoned
it out from first principles. Instead,
it is received from a coherent
philosophical and theological
framework. He accepts that he must
have faith because he understands
the limits of his rational mind.
Those who proclaim death-as-
oblivion do so, in part, because they
cannot abide their own ignorance.
A curious side effect of
this materialist creed becoming the
default cosmology of the modern
West is that murder, or indeed any
killing, has come to be seen as the
final, unforgivable sin. If death is the
one wound from which no man may
recover, then to kill, for any reason,
becomes the supreme transgression.
Even to kill in self-defense is, for
such minds, insufficiently justified,
for the slain man ceases to be.
This logic underpins much of
the modern opposition to capital
punishment: something so absolute,
so final, can never, it is said, be justly
administered by the hand of man.
The argument is not
without appeal. It seems reasonable
to assert that trusting anyone—even
blindfolded Lady Justice herself—
with the sword of finality is to invite
corruption, and that the result will
be injustice multiplied rather than
justice secured. Indeed, history
bears this out: tyrannies ancient and
modern—above all, the atheistic
regimes of the twentieth century—
sent millions to their deaths in the
name of “justice.” We congratulate
ourselves that we are more civilized
than these sorts, and perhaps even
more civilized than the ancients.
But is there truly a better way?
No. There is not. If one
accepts that there is life after this
one, then the best thing a criminal
DEFENDING THE SWORD
OF FINALITY
Justice, Mercy, and Capital Necessity
4
D EClaN I.M. D EaDY
3
Ours is an age of cruelty
made ordinary. We suffer indignities
our ancestors would have called
intolerable and congratulate
ourselves for our sensitivity in
bearing them. The disorders that
beset our public life—lawlessness
at the borders, confusion in the
schools, corruption in the courts,
decay in the churches—are not
accidents of policy but symptoms
of a deeper malaise: a civilization
that has forgotten what it means
to be just, and therefore what it
means to be merciful. We live cruel
and unusual lives, not because our
punishments are too severe, but
because our virtues are too weak.
The essays that follow
take their bearings from this crisis.
One confronts the decadence of
modern penology and dares to
ask whether a nation that will not
punish evil can long claim to hate
it. Another contends that the very
defense of life—once the hallmark
of Christian civilization—requires
a reexamination of justice itself,
lest mercy dissolve into sentiment
and the law into pity. Others turn
to the Inquisition and the family
to recover what the modern
conscience has unlearned: that
discipline, both civic and domestic,
is the seedbed of freedom. Still
another surveys our borders and
finds there a parable of the soul—a
nation so terrified of being called
cruel that it has forgotten how to
live at all. And one final meditation
reminds us that justice cannot be
suspended forever, for the blood of
the innocent cries even now from
the ground.
Together, these reflections
trace the anatomy of a civilization
losing its nerve. We are governed by
a class that fears virtue because it
implies judgment, and by a people
who mistake comfort for peace. Our
politics, our institutions, even our
homes have grown humane to the
point of self-extinction. Yet if the
ship of state is to be steered from
the rocks toward which it drifts, it
will not be by indulgence, but by
the recovery of what our forebears
called order—an order tempered
by charity, but firm in conviction,
confident that civilization is worth
both defending and disciplining.
The cruelty of our time lies
not in what we forbid, but in what we
permit. To live humanely again, we
must dare to be thought severe. a
EDITOR’S NOTE
Cruel & Unusual Living
Publius
p. 4
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who has committed a capital offense
can do is confess, repent, and
willingly accept his just punishment.
Such an acceptance, St. Thomas
Aquinas tells us, tempers the pains
due after particular judgment
and spares the soul a measure of
torment.1 Our modern system,
wherein criminals—especially those
convicted of capital offenses—
are encouraged to maintain
their innocence to the very end,
denies them this opportunity for
reconciliation with their victims
and with God.
Modern sentiment holds
that for criminal justice to be
legitimate, it must be rehabilitative,
and that any punishment failing
this sentimental test has no place
1 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, II–II, q. 66, a. 6; q. 68, a. 1; and Supplementum, q.
15, a. 3. Aquinas teaches that the willing acceptance of temporal punishment for sin mitigates the
punishment due after death, since “by enduring punishment voluntarily, man makes satisfaction for
sin.”
in a “modern” state. The problem
is that this framework ignores
the moral and social goods of
retributive justice. The most
familiar defense of retribution is
that it deters crime—that it “makes
an example” of wrongdoers. But
this utilitarian argument is thin
gruel. It assumes deterrence is the
highest good of punishment, just
as the rehabilitative model assumes
reform is. Both are mistaken.
Both see the criminal, rather than
the community, as the principal
beneficiary of justice.
This view overlooks the
vast majority who are not criminals
and are unlikely to become so. It
is they—the innocent, the decent,
the peaceable—who ought to be
the chief concern of any just order.
Criminal justice must exist not for the
comfort of the offender but for the
protection of the would-be victim.
Considering our exceptionally high
rates of recidivism,2 it is plain that
our system protects neither the
innocent nor the guilty. It neither
safeguards society nor saves souls.
The rejection of the death
penalty was heralded as a reform
that would protect the innocent,
wrongly accused, and usher in a
gentler, more just society. On its
face, that promise sounds noble.
The problem is that its fruits have
not borne out the claim. Policies
meant to prevent crime have instead
eroded the moral authority of law
itself. What they so often amount
to, in practice, is a soft anarchy—a
purge by neglect rather than decree.
A society where crime is tolerated is
no society at all. To mend this state
of affairs, we must first remember
why we put men to death: not out
of vengeance, but out of justice and
charity. The death penalty is the
state’s most solemn declaration that
one has so violated the sacred duties
of membership in society that life
within it is no longer tolerable. It is,
in essence, a permanent exile. This
exile protects the innocent from
further evil and, paradoxically,
protects the evildoer by preventing
him from compounding his sin.
To restore a culture of
justice will require patience—
perhaps a century’s work—and it
will be costly. But is it not far more
expensive to rebuild civilization
2 U.S. Sentencing Commission, Recidivism of Federal Violent Offenders Released in 2010
from its ruins than to repair it now?
Civilization is separated
from barbarism by the existence of
law. The barbarian has no code; the
civilized man does. Are we willing
to surrender our divinely inherited
civilization merely to be seen as
“kind”? Will we refuse to be truly
charitable for fear of being called
uncharitable by those who despise
Truth? The barbarians—and those
who love them—are among us.
We must not allow the enemies
of righteousness, of order, and of
Civilization itself to prevail. a.
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Paul Delaroche, 1833
Ignatius
65
can do is confess, repent, and
willingly accept his just punishment.
Such an acceptance, St. Thomas
Aquinas tells us, tempers the pains
due after particular judgment
and spares the soul a measure of
torment.1 Our modern system,
wherein criminals—especially those
convicted of capital offenses—
are encouraged to maintain
their innocence to the very end,
denies them this opportunity for
reconciliation with their victims
and with God.
Modern sentiment holds
that for criminal justice to be
legitimate, it must be rehabilitative,
and that any punishment failing
this sentimental test has no place
1 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, II–II, q. 66, a. 6; q. 68, a. 1; and Supplementum, q.
15, a. 3. Aquinas teaches that the willing acceptance of temporal punishment for sin mitigates the
punishment due after death, since “by enduring punishment voluntarily, man makes satisfaction for
sin.”
in a “modern” state. The problem
is that this framework ignores
the moral and social goods of
retributive justice. The most
familiar defense of retribution is
that it deters crime—that it “makes
an example” of wrongdoers. But
this utilitarian argument is thin
gruel. It assumes deterrence is the
highest good of punishment, just
as the rehabilitative model assumes
reform is. Both are mistaken.
Both see the criminal, rather than
the community, as the principal
beneficiary of justice.
This view overlooks the
vast majority who are not criminals
and are unlikely to become so. It
is they—the innocent, the decent,
the peaceable—who ought to be
the chief concern of any just order.
Criminal justice must exist not for the
comfort of the offender but for the
protection of the would-be victim.
Considering our exceptionally high
rates of recidivism,2 it is plain that
our system protects neither the
innocent nor the guilty. It neither
safeguards society nor saves souls.
The rejection of the death
penalty was heralded as a reform
that would protect the innocent,
wrongly accused, and usher in a
gentler, more just society. On its
face, that promise sounds noble.
The problem is that its fruits have
not borne out the claim. Policies
meant to prevent crime have instead
eroded the moral authority of law
itself. What they so often amount
to, in practice, is a soft anarchy—a
purge by neglect rather than decree.
A society where crime is tolerated is
no society at all. To mend this state
of affairs, we must first remember
why we put men to death: not out
of vengeance, but out of justice and
charity. The death penalty is the
state’s most solemn declaration that
one has so violated the sacred duties
of membership in society that life
within it is no longer tolerable. It is,
in essence, a permanent exile. This
exile protects the innocent from
further evil and, paradoxically,
protects the evildoer by preventing
him from compounding his sin.
To restore a culture of
justice will require patience—
perhaps a century’s work—and it
will be costly. But is it not far more
expensive to rebuild civilization
2 U.S. Sentencing Commission, Recidivism of Federal Violent Offenders Released in 2010
from its ruins than to repair it now?
Civilization is separated
from barbarism by the existence of
law. The barbarian has no code; the
civilized man does. Are we willing
to surrender our divinely inherited
civilization merely to be seen as
“kind”? Will we refuse to be truly
charitable for fear of being called
uncharitable by those who despise
Truth? The barbarians—and those
who love them—are among us.
We must not allow the enemies
of righteousness, of order, and of
Civilization itself to prevail. a.
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Paul Delaroche, 1833
Ignatius
65
p. 22
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Its violation is both irrational and sinful,
and because justice is the constant and
perpetual will to render to each his due,
any society that withholds retribution from
the violator of natural law has betrayed its
own foundation.
Modern jurisprudence has
forgotten this. The positivist, inheriting
Hobbes’s absolutism, supposes that
right and wrong are what the sovereign
commands, that the law is the sum of
statutes and penalties, and that morality is
private sentiment.9 The liberal, recoiling
from the violence of that doctrine, retreats
into proceduralism. So long as the process
is fair, they suppose, the outcome cannot
be unjust. Both positions converge in error.
If the law is detached from the moral
order, it loses the power to command the
conscience, and men obey it only from fear.
Law becomes a contract of mutual non-
aggression, not a tutor in virtue. And when
the state blesses evil with legality, it corrupts
the very source of its legitimacy.
Further, punishment is not the
enemy of mercy but its precondition.
Mercy presupposes guilt; it does not abolish
it. To punish is to acknowledge the moral
seriousness of human acts and to reaffirm
the sanctity of the good that has been
things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves: Who shew the work of
the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between
themselves accusing, or also defending one another, In the day when God shall judge the secrets of
men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.”
9 Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 15, OF THE LAWES OF NATURE: “ Law, properly is the
word of him, that by right hath command over others.” Hobbes, however, also writes in Chapter
14, OF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURALL LAWES, AND OF CONTRACTS: “A LAW
OF NATURE, (Lex Naturalis,) is a Precept, or generall Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man
is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the
same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved.”
10 Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of
Providence: “All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the
horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and
at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.”
11 Genesis 4:10 (DRA)
violated. Joseph de Maistre, contemplating
the wreckage of revolutionary France,
wrote that “the executioner is the horror
and bond of human association.”10 His
remark was not a hymn to cruelty but to
order: without the power to punish, a
people ceases to be a people, because it
loses the capacity to distinguish justice
from sentiment. Removing retribution
from the moral cosmos effectively declares
the universe, and its Creator, indifferent to
good and evil.
If this is true, then a civilization
that legalizes the destruction of the
unborn, the mutilation of reproductive
organs, or the commercial manufacture
of human life has placed itself in rebellion
not merely against nature but against
justice itself. Such a civilization cannot
endure; it carries within it the seeds of
divine judgment. There are limits to God’s
patience with nations as with men. “The
voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me
from the earth,” said the Lord to Cain;11
and that cry has never ceased. The millions
destroyed under the guise of mercy, the
children rendered infertile in the name of
identity, the women reduced to instruments
of commerce—these are not private
tragedies but public crimes. Their blood
demands atonement, and if man will not
exact it, Heaven will.
Here one must speak with
precision. To call for punishment after
the fact is not, in this sense, to indulge
vengeance. Rather, it is to vindicate the
moral order. The prohibition of ex post
facto laws in our Constitution was framed
to prevent tyranny, to secure the citizen
against arbitrary decrees. But it was never
meant to absolve those who, under cover
of legality, commit acts that conscience
and reason have always condemned.
The Nuremberg tribunals, imperfect yet
indispensable, recognized this distinction.
The defendants pleaded that their deeds
were sanctioned by law; the judges replied
that there is a higher law to which every
man is bound. “Crimes against humanity”
was the phrase chosen, an appeal to the
natural law itself, older and more binding
than any code of the Reich.
Our own predicament differs
only in degree, not in kind. The abortionist
may quote statutes and the sex-change
surgeon may cite medical consensus just
as the Nazi quoted orders, but the moral
blindness is the same, and the excuse just as
hollow. There are acts so contrary to reason
and nature that the soul of man recognizes
their evil without instruction. To claim
ignorance is to confess corruption.
If the argument holds, then
justice requires both reform and reckoning.
The law must declare, even retroactively,
that certain deeds were crimes ab initio—
not because the legislature has changed its
mind, but because the acts were contrary
to the law of nature before they were ever
codified. To punish them is to restore the
continuity between the moral and the
legal, to close the chasm that modernity
has opened between conscience and
statute. Such punishment would not
be the introduction of new law but the
recognition of an older one, reasserted
after an age of eclipse.
Yet prudence must guide zeal.
Justice, though it demands blood, must
not be drunk with it. The restoration of
order cannot proceed through anarchy.
Any society that undertakes to punish
retroactively must do so with solemn
restraint, with public acknowledgment
of its own guilt for having permitted
the crimes, with procedures that protect
against excess, and with mercy for those
misled rather than malicious. The purpose
of punishment is to expiate, not to destroy.
It is the reestablishment of moral truth in
the order of the world.
No punishment will ever equal
the destruction done, but punishment may
prevent a worse evil—the moral callus that
forms when atrocity is left unpunished.
Nations, like men, grow sicker when their
sins are left unnamed. To punish after the
fact is to confess that the law had failed to
recognize justice, and in that confession lies
the beginning of repentance. A civilization
that refuses to punish what it knows to be
evil renounces the right to exist. For where
there is no retribution, there can be no
responsibility; and without responsibility,
liberty decays.
The objection will be made
that such reasoning opens the door to
fanaticism, that if every faction punishes
according to its conscience, the rule of law
will perish. The fear is not groundless. Yet
the alternative—moral paralysis—is worse.
A people that will not act on its deepest
convictions of justice because it fears excess
will in time lose the capacity for conviction
at all. Prudence is not cowardice; it is
courage disciplined by reason. The
invocation of natural law does not dissolve
human law. It recalls it to its origin.
If ever the West is to recover
sanity, it must restore that hierarchy.
4039
and because justice is the constant and
perpetual will to render to each his due,
any society that withholds retribution from
the violator of natural law has betrayed its
own foundation.
Modern jurisprudence has
forgotten this. The positivist, inheriting
Hobbes’s absolutism, supposes that
right and wrong are what the sovereign
commands, that the law is the sum of
statutes and penalties, and that morality is
private sentiment.9 The liberal, recoiling
from the violence of that doctrine, retreats
into proceduralism. So long as the process
is fair, they suppose, the outcome cannot
be unjust. Both positions converge in error.
If the law is detached from the moral
order, it loses the power to command the
conscience, and men obey it only from fear.
Law becomes a contract of mutual non-
aggression, not a tutor in virtue. And when
the state blesses evil with legality, it corrupts
the very source of its legitimacy.
Further, punishment is not the
enemy of mercy but its precondition.
Mercy presupposes guilt; it does not abolish
it. To punish is to acknowledge the moral
seriousness of human acts and to reaffirm
the sanctity of the good that has been
things that are of the law; these having not the law are a law to themselves: Who shew the work of
the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them, and their thoughts between
themselves accusing, or also defending one another, In the day when God shall judge the secrets of
men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.”
9 Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 15, OF THE LAWES OF NATURE: “ Law, properly is the
word of him, that by right hath command over others.” Hobbes, however, also writes in Chapter
14, OF THE FIRST AND SECOND NATURALL LAWES, AND OF CONTRACTS: “A LAW
OF NATURE, (Lex Naturalis,) is a Precept, or generall Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man
is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the
same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved.”
10 Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of
Providence: “All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the
horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and
at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.”
11 Genesis 4:10 (DRA)
violated. Joseph de Maistre, contemplating
the wreckage of revolutionary France,
wrote that “the executioner is the horror
and bond of human association.”10 His
remark was not a hymn to cruelty but to
order: without the power to punish, a
people ceases to be a people, because it
loses the capacity to distinguish justice
from sentiment. Removing retribution
from the moral cosmos effectively declares
the universe, and its Creator, indifferent to
good and evil.
If this is true, then a civilization
that legalizes the destruction of the
unborn, the mutilation of reproductive
organs, or the commercial manufacture
of human life has placed itself in rebellion
not merely against nature but against
justice itself. Such a civilization cannot
endure; it carries within it the seeds of
divine judgment. There are limits to God’s
patience with nations as with men. “The
voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me
from the earth,” said the Lord to Cain;11
and that cry has never ceased. The millions
destroyed under the guise of mercy, the
children rendered infertile in the name of
identity, the women reduced to instruments
of commerce—these are not private
tragedies but public crimes. Their blood
demands atonement, and if man will not
exact it, Heaven will.
Here one must speak with
precision. To call for punishment after
the fact is not, in this sense, to indulge
vengeance. Rather, it is to vindicate the
moral order. The prohibition of ex post
facto laws in our Constitution was framed
to prevent tyranny, to secure the citizen
against arbitrary decrees. But it was never
meant to absolve those who, under cover
of legality, commit acts that conscience
and reason have always condemned.
The Nuremberg tribunals, imperfect yet
indispensable, recognized this distinction.
The defendants pleaded that their deeds
were sanctioned by law; the judges replied
that there is a higher law to which every
man is bound. “Crimes against humanity”
was the phrase chosen, an appeal to the
natural law itself, older and more binding
than any code of the Reich.
Our own predicament differs
only in degree, not in kind. The abortionist
may quote statutes and the sex-change
surgeon may cite medical consensus just
as the Nazi quoted orders, but the moral
blindness is the same, and the excuse just as
hollow. There are acts so contrary to reason
and nature that the soul of man recognizes
their evil without instruction. To claim
ignorance is to confess corruption.
If the argument holds, then
justice requires both reform and reckoning.
The law must declare, even retroactively,
that certain deeds were crimes ab initio—
not because the legislature has changed its
mind, but because the acts were contrary
to the law of nature before they were ever
codified. To punish them is to restore the
continuity between the moral and the
legal, to close the chasm that modernity
has opened between conscience and
statute. Such punishment would not
be the introduction of new law but the
recognition of an older one, reasserted
after an age of eclipse.
Yet prudence must guide zeal.
Justice, though it demands blood, must
not be drunk with it. The restoration of
order cannot proceed through anarchy.
Any society that undertakes to punish
retroactively must do so with solemn
restraint, with public acknowledgment
of its own guilt for having permitted
the crimes, with procedures that protect
against excess, and with mercy for those
misled rather than malicious. The purpose
of punishment is to expiate, not to destroy.
It is the reestablishment of moral truth in
the order of the world.
No punishment will ever equal
the destruction done, but punishment may
prevent a worse evil—the moral callus that
forms when atrocity is left unpunished.
Nations, like men, grow sicker when their
sins are left unnamed. To punish after the
fact is to confess that the law had failed to
recognize justice, and in that confession lies
the beginning of repentance. A civilization
that refuses to punish what it knows to be
evil renounces the right to exist. For where
there is no retribution, there can be no
responsibility; and without responsibility,
liberty decays.
The objection will be made
that such reasoning opens the door to
fanaticism, that if every faction punishes
according to its conscience, the rule of law
will perish. The fear is not groundless. Yet
the alternative—moral paralysis—is worse.
A people that will not act on its deepest
convictions of justice because it fears excess
will in time lose the capacity for conviction
at all. Prudence is not cowardice; it is
courage disciplined by reason. The
invocation of natural law does not dissolve
human law. It recalls it to its origin.
If ever the West is to recover
sanity, it must restore that hierarchy.
4039
p. 24
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To my victims, I leave prayers, asking their
Forgiveness, which I have no right to ask,
For their crimes were not so great as to call
Down my swift axe, well-sharpened, on their necks.
To my mother, leave I apologies,
This was not the life you’d have had me lead
But ev’ry man needs shelter, food, and drink
And Death’s Angel served in duty and deed
To the abbot, long suff’ring confessor
My thanks is all I can offer today
And a few pennies laid on darkened eyes
In hope one holy mass for me you’ll pray
To king, and to country, all else I own,
In life gave I, my soul, in death, my stone.
Mauritius
THE EXECUTIONER’S WILL
D EClaN I.M. D EaDY
a
Law must again be understood as moral
pedagogy, politics as the guardianship
of the common good, and punishment
as the visible sign that the moral order
still holds. The abortionist’s forceps, the
pornographer’s camera, the trafficker’s
contract, the surgeon’s scalpel—all these
will one day be seen for what they are: relics
of an age that mistook license for liberty
and created as a result more suffering than
the world had ever known. Whether that
day of reckoning is temporal or divine
remains to be seen, but it will come. The
natural law is not repealed by forgetfulness.
Every great repentance begins
with a recognition that the law of God has
been mocked. The Israelites tore down their
idols. The Athenians raised altars to the
unknown God. Even revolutionary France,
after drowning itself in the blood of princes
and priests, rebuilt its churches. So too must
we. We do not punish the guilty because
we delight in their suffering; we do it to
restore the moral architecture of the world.
Civilization endures only where innocence
is protected and sin acknowledged. Mercy
for the guilty is cruelty to the innocent just
as leniency for the destroyer is treachery to
the destroyed.
We live in that hour of testing.
Our courts are crowded, our statutes
swollen, yet justice lies prostrate. The
question is no longer whether particular
acts are legal but whether the civilization
that permits them can survive. No order
that denies the natural law can long escape
its consequences. The blood of the innocent
cries out, and the answer must be more than
words. The time for persuasion has passed;
the time for judgment approaches. If we
would not be judged by wrath, we must
judge by reason. Justice demands blood—
not as vengeance, but as sacrifice, as the
visible acknowledgment that some evils are
intolerable and that a people’s soul is worth
the price of its repentance. To punish those
who have knowingly violated the natural
law is to confess that law’s sovereignty and
to reclaim for our civilization the right to
call itself just. a
John Henry Newman
4443
Forgiveness, which I have no right to ask,
For their crimes were not so great as to call
Down my swift axe, well-sharpened, on their necks.
To my mother, leave I apologies,
This was not the life you’d have had me lead
But ev’ry man needs shelter, food, and drink
And Death’s Angel served in duty and deed
To the abbot, long suff’ring confessor
My thanks is all I can offer today
And a few pennies laid on darkened eyes
In hope one holy mass for me you’ll pray
To king, and to country, all else I own,
In life gave I, my soul, in death, my stone.
Mauritius
THE EXECUTIONER’S WILL
D EClaN I.M. D EaDY
a
Law must again be understood as moral
pedagogy, politics as the guardianship
of the common good, and punishment
as the visible sign that the moral order
still holds. The abortionist’s forceps, the
pornographer’s camera, the trafficker’s
contract, the surgeon’s scalpel—all these
will one day be seen for what they are: relics
of an age that mistook license for liberty
and created as a result more suffering than
the world had ever known. Whether that
day of reckoning is temporal or divine
remains to be seen, but it will come. The
natural law is not repealed by forgetfulness.
Every great repentance begins
with a recognition that the law of God has
been mocked. The Israelites tore down their
idols. The Athenians raised altars to the
unknown God. Even revolutionary France,
after drowning itself in the blood of princes
and priests, rebuilt its churches. So too must
we. We do not punish the guilty because
we delight in their suffering; we do it to
restore the moral architecture of the world.
Civilization endures only where innocence
is protected and sin acknowledged. Mercy
for the guilty is cruelty to the innocent just
as leniency for the destroyer is treachery to
the destroyed.
We live in that hour of testing.
Our courts are crowded, our statutes
swollen, yet justice lies prostrate. The
question is no longer whether particular
acts are legal but whether the civilization
that permits them can survive. No order
that denies the natural law can long escape
its consequences. The blood of the innocent
cries out, and the answer must be more than
words. The time for persuasion has passed;
the time for judgment approaches. If we
would not be judged by wrath, we must
judge by reason. Justice demands blood—
not as vengeance, but as sacrifice, as the
visible acknowledgment that some evils are
intolerable and that a people’s soul is worth
the price of its repentance. To punish those
who have knowingly violated the natural
law is to confess that law’s sovereignty and
to reclaim for our civilization the right to
call itself just. a
John Henry Newman
4443
